Android phones around San Francisco’s Bay Area buzzed with an alert on Tuesday morning: A 4.8 magnitude earthquake was about to hit. “You may have felt shaking,” some of the messages read. More than a million Android users saw the alert. And for some, it arrived seconds before the ground even started moving.
Google has also turned individual phones into miniature earthquake sensors. All smartphones have accelerometers that can pick up signals of an earthquake. If triggered, the phone sends the message to a detection server, along with rough location data, like the city a device is in. The server then pieces together where the earthquake is happening from data collected on multiple phones and beams out the relevant alerts.
Stogaitis says phones only pick up the waves when plugged in and locked. That helps to avoid confusion from phones jostling around in bags and pockets.
I suppose it is debatable about how a few seconds may help someone, and of course many may have their phones on silent, etc. But I imagine if it only helps a few people even, it can serve a useful purpose. It does demonstrate though that crowdsourcing some data can be used for good purposes.
#technology #earthquakes #android #crowdsourcing